UPDATE 1:57 CT: Amid the bug fixes in the latest server patch notes released by EA comes the incredibly important word that EA has "disabled Cheetah speed," the fastest simulation speed setting. Games set to Cheetah will now run at the noticeably slower Llama speed.

Presumably this is to give the servers more time to process the thousands of simultaneous city simulations that are all feeding into its global and regional networks. In any case, this is a core piece of the gameplay that's now being hampered by EA's continuing server problems; in my 16 or so hours playing the game, I'd estimate 15 or so have been spent running at Cheetah. Slowing things down, even temporarily, is likely to impact a whole lot of players negatively.

In other news, Amazon has stopped offering the PC download edition of SimCity, and is now warning shoppers that "many customers are having issues connecting to the 'SimCity' servers." on its product page, directing those concerned to EA's customer support.

ORIGINAL STORY

Those hoping that EA would quickly solve the server problems plaguing SimCity since its US launch Tuesday won't be happy with the publisher's latest news. Community Manager LadyCoconut announced this morning that EA is rolling out a server hotfix that improves stability but also "disables a few non-critical gameplay features (leaderboards, achievements, and region filters)."

None of the affected features are really central to the SimCity experience, but it's not an encouraging sign that EA is finding it necessary to scale back the game's capabilities as it struggles to keep up with server demand.

The feature rollback follows rolling patch deployments that temporarily shut down all servers yesterday and what EA describes as "heavy traffic" yesterday evening. "We are aggressively undergoing maintenance on the servers and adding capacity to meet demand," LadyCoconut posted in a middle-of-the-night message. "Performance will fluctuate during this process. Our fans are important to us, and we thank you for your continued patience."

Last night, Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis admitted to being upset. "Technical issues have become more prominent in the last 24 hours," Katsarelis noted. "We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers. This is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues."

Katsarelis promised the team would be rolling out even more servers in the next two days and is working hard to roll out more updates to fix any bugs that pop up. That said, he also noted the game has been immensely popular, with 38 million buildings plopped down in a single 24-hour period by players who were able to use the existing server architecture.

Meanwhile, customers in Japan and Australia are now able to download the game launcher ahead of the official release. That's a step in the right direction as EA works to avoid repeating the same problems for the game's international launch, though players will still have to download a massive update after the local game servers are officially turned on.

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl